Reforming Capital Gains Taxes in Alberta finds that Alberta should eliminate the provincial portion of the capital gains tax—lowering it from 24 to 16.5 per cent—to become more competitive with key energy-producing jurisdictions in the United States. Currently nine U.S. states do not impose a state-level capital gains tax, including several key energy-producing states—Texas, Wyoming and Alaska—which directly compete with Alberta for investment, entrepreneurs and even highly-skilled workers.

The Unintended Consequences of National Pharmacare Programs in Australia, New Zealand and the UK finds that publicly-funded pharmacare schemes—similar to what some policymakers in Canada are considering—in other developed countries have resulted in reduced access to new drugs for patients, drug shortages, higher taxes and less pharmaceutical innovation.

The Human Freedom Index, 2018 finds that New Zealand is the freest country in the world, followed by Switzerland and Hong Kong. Canada ranks 5th globally, and the United States ranks 17th in this year’s report. The index ranks 162 countries and jurisdictions based on 79 indicators of personal, civil and economic freedoms and is a joint project with the Cato Institute in the U.S. and Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.

Risk and Reward in Public Sector Pension Plans: a Taxpayer’s Perspective finds that government employees don’t pay the full cost of their defined-benefit pensions, and in fact, taxpayers provide a $22 billion annual subsidy to public sector pensions by assuming undisclosed investment risks for which they are not compensated.

Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2018 finds that the median wait time for medically necessary treatment in Canada this year was 19.8 weeks. Among the provinces, Saskatchewan has the shortest median wait time this year at 15.4 weeks, and New Brunswick again recorded the longest wait time (45.1 weeks).

Global Petroleum Survey, 2018 finds that Alberta and British Columbia are the least-attractive jurisdictions in Canada for oil and gas investment. And for the first time in more than five years, no Canadian province even ranked in the top 10 most-attractive worldwide, with nine of the top 10 spots going to U.S. states.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are again this year tied as the most economically-free nations in the Arab world, according to the Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2018 Annual Report, co-published by the Fraser Institute, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty and the International Research Foundation. This report compares and ranks 22 Arab nations in five areas of economic freedom: size of government, including expenditures, taxes and enterprises; commercial and economic law and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation of credit, labour and business.

Evaluating the State of Fresh Water in Canada finds that the quantity and quality of freshwater across the country is generally very good, with four out of five (82 per cent) of the country’s freshwater monitoring sites reporting fair to excellent quality between 2014 and 2016. Notably, Canada has the world’s third-largest renewable supply of freshwater and Canadians only consume a small fraction (about one per cent) of the freshwater available annually.